Much of the best recent scholarship on the implementation of the Tudor Reformations has chosen as its leitmotif the themes of obedience, conformity and acquiescence, collaboration even. The revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s overthrew convincingly the notion of widespread popular enthusiasm for religious change. But given that change was successfully imposed, part of revisionism’s legacy has been a somewhat optimistic assessment of the capabilities of the Tudor state. Whether allied to the cause of religious reform, or that of religious reaction, Tudor governments were apparently remarkably effective at enforcing their will, largely because of their ability to co-opt the energies and loyalties of locally-based elites and sub-elites. In terms of this volume’s twin themes, it appears to be a case of discipline successfully exerted; diversity effectively curtailed.

Much has been made of the roots of Darwinian theory in the work of Thomas Malthus, who argued for the inevitability of strife, suffering and death following on the scarcity of resources and the tendency of populations to multiply without limit. It has been noted that a Malthusian pessimism about human nature re-emerged in the 1830s, darkening the political discussions surrounding the welfare of the poor, and informing the legislation of the Poor Laws in those crucial years in which Darwin formulated his natural selection theory. Historians have also focussed on the harshness of the social Darwinism that was taken up by theorists later in the century, in contrast to the more optimistic, Lamarckian evolution of Herbert Spencer, Peter Kropotkin and others. Yet in the closing passage of Origin of Species, Darwin extended his famous metaphor of the entangled bank, offering a form of redemption through struggle toward higher forms of life.

In 1926 the Revd James Houston Baxter, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of St Andrews, wrote in the Records of the Scottish Church History Society: ‘The attempts of modern Roman Catholics to describe the Roman Church in Scotland have been, with the exception of Bellesheim’s History, disfigured not only by uncritical partisanship, which is perhaps unavoidable, but by a glaring lack of scholarship, which makes them both useless and harmful.’ The same issue of the journal makes it clear that Roman Catholics were not welcome as members of the society. This essay will look at the historiography of the Scottish Reformation to see how the Catholics ‘fought back’ against the aspersions cast on them, and how a partisan Protestant view was dethroned with the help of another society founded ten years before the Ecclesiastical History Society, the Scottish Catholic Historical Association (SCHA).

By the time of the rise of Islam in the early seventh century, Christian writers had already developed a complex methodology of historical writing, one that was not merely concerned with preserving the history of past events, but which viewed contemporary and past events through the lens of the biblical narrative of history, from creation to the ultimate end as prophesied in the eschatological books of the Bible. In this model, the history of the world could be traced from creation to follow the story of God’s revelation of himself to humankind through the prophets, through inspired Scripture and, most importantly, through Christ.

Since the Enlightenment, historians and theorists of religion have often worked with a two-tiered model of Christianity, in which the pure belief and practice of the enlightened few was perceived as constantly under pressure and in danger of corruption or distortion from the grosser religion of the multitude. This imagined polarity between the sophisticated religion of the elite and the crude religion of the people at large underlay much Enlightenment historiography, most notably Gibbon’s account of the early history of Christianity, and has remained potent in such influential twentieth century works as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. Even the future Cardinal Newman could contrast ‘what has power to stir holy and refined souls’ with the ‘religion of the multitude’ which he once described as ‘ever vulgar and abnormal’. Newman, as more than one contributor to this volume shows, had in fact an acute sense of the value, even the normative value, of popular religious perceptions, but those implicit polarities and the historical condescension they encode have been recurrent and assertive ghosts, haunting the writing of religious history, in contrasts between official and unofficial religion, or those between clerical and lay, literate and illiterate, rich and poor, hierarchical and charismatic.

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that the practice of religion will be influenced by the social conditions prevailing in any given locality.’ The debate on this statement is largely concentrated for present purposes into a consideration of activities between c1100 and c1250 in two distinctive societies: Westminster abbey and its environs and, in contrast, the city and diocese of Worcester. The essential function of Westminster abbey was, of course, intercessory, and while this role was shared with Worcester cathedral, the latter church had also a wide-ranging pastoral responsibility. In this sense, no exact equation can be made, yet the richness of the records which both churches accumulated presents adequate material for a valid comparison in other respects. It is not intended, and is, indeed, impossible to make an arbitrary definition of Westminster as town and Worcester as countryside. Elements of both were contained in Westminster and Worcester alike.

Looking back a hundred years after the death of Constantine the historian Sozomen wrote:

He contrasted this with Constantine’s success in repressing the sects. Sozomen is clearly right as far as he goes. Antiheresy laws gave powers to bishops they did not have before. He goes on:

We shall look more closely at this change.

A major trend in the recent historiography of medieval and renaissance Italy has been towards the reassertion of the fundamental importance of the countryside and of agriculture. This is not so much to deny the unique position occupied by the cities in Italian life as to remind us of some essential features of those cities and of the men who ruled them. Towns were more typically market centres for their localities than entrepôts of long-distance commerce; while many members of both the higher and the lower urban social strata carried with them throughout life a status ultimately derived from the status they or their forebears occupied or had occupied in rural life. Conversely, the members of, say, the Florentine urban patriciate around the year 1400 were almost to a man landlords in the surrounding countryside. They were also of course the men who made the laws, levied taxation and generally controlled the government of the countryside as of the town. At every level of life we have to postulate an intimacy of relations between town and country which the conditions of modern urban life can make it an effort even to imagine.

‘It is possible that no breed of men and women can be so safely assessed as the nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. No other breed, certainly, left more voluminous accounts of themselves to posterity.’ If the volume of documentation is a guarantee of safe assessment then Moorhouse’s bold assertion is particularly applicable to the subject of missionary motivation in Britain in die nineteenth century. Statements of motive, explicitly requested by directors of missionary societies, prayerfully considered and copiously detailed by candidates, and lovingly preserved by missionary-society archivists, might comprise the most voluminous extant documentation on religious motivation (Moorhouse’s boldness is infectious). Furthermore, this vast corpus of primary source material has been thoroughly ransacked by postgraduate students of history and sociology, so that the motives of English and Scottish missionaries for the whole of the nineteenth century have now been explored.

British Anglo-Catholic and high church Anglicans promoted a new set of foreign missionary initiatives in the Pacific and South and East Africa in the 1860s. Theorizing new indigenizing models for mission inspired by Tractarian medievalism, the initiatives envisioned a different and better engagement with ‘native’ cultures. Despite setbacks, the continued use of Anglican sisters in Hawai‘i and brothers in Melanesia, Africa and India created a potent new imaginative space for missionary endeavour, but one problematized by the uneven reach of empire: from contested, as in the Pacific, to normal and pervasive, as in India. Of particular relevance was the Sandwich Islands mission, invited by the Hawaiian crown, where Bishop T. N. Staley arrived in 1862, followed by Anglican missionary sisters in 1864. Immensely controversial in Britain and America, where among evangelicals in particular suspicion of ‘popish’ religious practice ran high, Anglo-Catholic methods and religious communities mobilized discussion, denunciation and reaction. Particularly in the contested imperial space of an independent indigenous monarchy, Anglo-Catholics criticized what they styled the cruel austerities of evangelical American ‘puritanism’ and the ambitions of American imperialists; in the process they catalyzed a reconceptualized imperial reformism with important implications for the shape of the late Victorian British empire.

In 1530 Richard Whitford published A Werke for Housholders, for ‘them that have gydyng and governaunce of any company for an order to be kepte bothe in them selfe | and in them that they have in rule and charge’. The work swiftly went through at least seven editions in as many years; Tudor householders clearly found something of value in its advice. Its author was many things: a Bridgettine monk, a humanist, a prolific author of works in the vernacular, and a survivor who went on writing and publishing even after the dissolution of his monastery. He died in 1543. His books provide some important insights into vernacular humanism and late medieval monasticism, and the often unappreciated relationship between the two, which was demonstrated by his reflections on household piety. This essay argues that Whitford’s Werke for Housholders was rooted in his monastic experience, closely linked to Syon’s pastoral role, and that ideas about the early modern ‘godly household’ should perhaps be adjusted in the light of this connection.

At the end of the eighteenth century the ‘bloody code’ was still in full force in England and Wales. There were some two hundred offences which carried the death penalty, ranging from murder to stealing goods worth five shillings from a shop. In the 1780s several hundred men, women and children were sentenced to death each year, and though rather over half were reprieved, there were still about two hundred executions. In London, condemned prisoners were confined in Newgate prison in the City, and until 1783 they were transported two miles to be hanged at Tyburn on the western outskirts of the metropolis. There were usually large crowds lining the streets, and particularly notorious criminals might expect up to thirty thousand spectators at their death. A clergyman would travel in the cart with the prisoners, his main purpose being to ensure that they died repentant, and, it was hoped, with better prospects in the next world than in the present one.

One purpose of canonization, particularly for founders of religious orders, is to present a paradigm for emulation. The legacy of Charles de Foucauld (1858—1916), a Catholic hermit who lived and died in French Algeria as a witness for Christianity to Islam, has been in some dispute. There are nineteen different congregations and associations in the Foucauldian spiritual family, only one of which came to fruition during his lifetime. His beatification in 2005 has sparked a debate about the nature of his vocation, and consequently about which of his characteristics should be emulated. This raises the question of whether he was a monk or a missionary. Careful consideration of his life is an essential prerequisite for answering these questions.

Since June 2014 the Chaldean Catholic Church has faced an existential crisis. The recent attacks of the terrorist forces of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in the northern Iraqi provinces of Duhok, Erbil, Mosul and Sulaymaniya have resulted in increasing levels of persecution and forced displacement. This essay reflects on a more secure period in Chaldean history, during which the community made a strong contribution to the development of the modern state of Iraq, established in 1921. Although proportionally small in size, the essay will show that the Chaldean community contributed in ways which far outweighed their numbers, especially in the sphere of inter-communal relations.

Kings and princes who were classed as ‘innocent martyrs’ or ‘passion-sufferers’ because they were thought to have been murdered in Christlike circumstances were known in many parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. This paper is about six Anglo-Saxon saints of this type, who are also distinguished by their youth. All of them were thought to have been boys or teenage males when they were martyred. To date, work on these saints has concentrated on questions concerning the origins of their cults, and their relationship to the institution of kingship. The purpose of this paper, however, is to draw attention to the ways in which certain religious communities redefined their sanctity in the late tenth and eleventh century, and to make some tentative suggestions about the possible uses to which these cults were put in this milieu.

The Council of Pisa was the fruit of a long period of gestation. Intermittently over centuries canonists had discussed where in various contingencies the supreme authority in the Church lay—with the pope, the cardinals, the universitas fidelium in a general council. Twice in the fourteenth century theory was nearly tested by practice, when Philip the Fair opposed Boniface VIII and when Louis of Bavaria faced John XXII. The final challenge was given by the Great Schism. Begun in 1378 it dragged on for decades, causing irreparable damage to Christian Europe. Neither of the rival ‘popes’ showed any genuine goodwill to end it. So others, particularly in France, lent a hand. When Benedict XIII in Avignon refused the via cessionis (abdication) and paid only lip-service to the via discussionis, the court of Paris withdrew its obedience and the theologians of the French universities justified the royal action.

During the first half of the sixteenth century, Hungarian society underwent two dramatic changes. Firstly, Suleiman the Magnificent’s Ottoman armies advanced into the northern Balkans, causing the collapse of the Hungarian kingdom after the battle at Mohács in August 1526. Hungary subsequently became divided into three parts, with the Ottomans controlling the central and southern counties, the Habsburgs governing Royal Hungary from the Croatian coast to the mountains of Upper Hungary, and a series of native nobles elected to rule over the Transylvanian principality, which included the counties of the eastern Hungarian plain. Secondly, the spread of Protestant ideas about religious reform brought confessional division to Hungary. The initial reform was to a large degree driven by a desire to purify the Catholic Church, whose spiritual credentials were badly discredited by the Ottoman invasion. By 1570 German- and Hungarian-speaking towns and most Hungarian magnates and nobles had abandoned the Catholic Church. German-speakers and nobles in western Hungarian counties on the whole adopted Lutheranism. Calvinism meanwhile came to dominate religious life in the eastern counties, and also received broad support within Transylvania, although some Hungarian towns and Szeklers in Transylvania instead embraced anti-Trinitarianism. Confessional loyalty across Hungary was decided by a variety of factors including patterns of communication and trading networks, the pre-Reformation structures of ecclesiastical organization, and feudal, regional, and family ties. Linguistic barriers were also crucial in determining adherence to a particular religion, with Lutheranism widely supported by German-speakers whilst Calvinism was almost exclusively the preserve of Magyar-speakers. It seems clear that some sense of linguistic or ethnic community assisted both Protestant Churches to reinforce attachment to their confessions.

The theme of the environment is one of the most popular and pressing themes of the present time. Somewhat late in the day we have become aware that we have been blindly secreting around ourselves conditions in which it is increasingly difficult for human or any other life to be lived. We have managed to build up a technological and economic order based on machine production and the possession of material goods which inescapably determines to a greater or lesser degree die lives of all the individuals born into it, reducing a great many of them to a state bordering on panic or hysteria. Indeed, we are told that the only real issue before us in this respect is whether uncontrolled technological destruction or uncontrolled population will be the first to tear the fabric of our civilisation to pieces. In spite of this, in the name of a ‘war on want’ or of developing ‘underdeveloped’ countries, or simply of progress or evolution or efficiency we go on methodically trying to apply on an even more diorough and extensive scale-on a global scale - exactly the same techniques and habits which have brought about the bleakness of our own world - a bleakness which one might describe as resulting at least in part from a desanctification of nature.